July 5, 2016 --

According to Sam Tanenhaus, in his New York Times Book Review article, June 26, “Why Populism Now?” “todays “angriest Americans” are the “conservative elite who feel betrayed by a base that used to fall in line behind whomever the party chose for them at election time, but now is rising up in childish or addled rebellion.”

Tanenhaus goes on to observe, “The rank and file have spurned party dogma, and the spurned dogmatists are fighting back.” LPR offers the term DBNortonism to describe the mindset of “conservative” Never Trumpers like Mona Charen and George Will.

DB is the plutocrat in Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe” who told John Doe that he and his fellow big shots “know what’s the best for the John Does of America, regardless of what tramps like you think.” D.B. went on to warn John Doe, “Why, with the newspapers and radio stations that these gentlemen control, we can kill the John Doe movement deader than a doornail, and we’ll do it too, the moment you step out of line.”

Our modern D.B. Norton-types, outraged that Republicans stepped out of line to vote for Donald J. Trump in the primaries, now aim at defeating Trump’s campaign by demonizing him and his voters as buffoons, bigots, racists, and immoral, among other insults -- even if it means the election of a president who will leave our traditional legacy of liberty “deader than a doornail.”